


Leviticus 19:28

by Zagzagael



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-04
Updated: 2015-07-04
Packaged: 2018-04-07 13:32:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 996
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4265040
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zagzagael/pseuds/Zagzagael
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Ye shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor print any marks upon you</i>
</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Furiosa is struggling with her betrayal of The Ace.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Leviticus 19:28

She could read a diagram, a map, the stars, a sign, and the road, but she couldn’t read a sentence, or a book. (She had tried to unlearn the skill of reading a face, a posture, the language of a body. All people were liars. The murdered world had made it such. Truth and untruth; slam poetry of the human condition.) So, she asked Capable to write it down, spell it out so that she could see the letters that formed his name. She wanted to be certain it was right.

On a ripped and tattered scrap of paper, she had his name. She memorized the shape, whispered it until she could speak it aloud without choking on it. After ten days the name was illegible, rubbed to fading between her thumb and fingers and she had Capable write it out again, this time in block letters at the nape of her neck, just beneath the brand. 

Then she went in search of the tattooist. 

+++

The caves still housed a majority of the war boys. Salvage leaning and creaking in each cavern, welding torches and saw blades making the metal scream with new purpose. The vehicles defined and promised freedom even if they were no longer the shiny and chrome ride into Valhalla. Crews were sent out to await the great heaving of the sea of sand, to watch for cars and corners of buildings rising up out of the depths of the earth. The shells and hulls, twisted metal carcasses, revealed by wind and storm. Out of the dry sea onto the dry land. The Dag was the one who likened the windswept treasures to the seashores of the Old World. She told the story of blue water and moist sand, glinting bits of glass and iridescent mother of pearl, holding up a book to show pictures. None of it seemed possible or true. But it lulled all of her listeners to sleep. The strange thought of it. 

+++

The burrows felt constrictive to her now, but the safety of the red tunnels was undeniable, still Furiosa was happy to see so many of the warriors had ventured outside to stand stunned beneath the constant flowing waterfall, sluicing off war paint and grim faces. Jousting and jockeying beneath the aqua cola falling like forgotten rain. Sometimes, in the earliest dawn, she would rise to greet the burn of the sun, and there would be piles of war pups and war boys asleep on the sand, in the shelter of the embrace of rock. Finishing out their half-lives in the wide open spaces of the world. It reassured her, to see them like that.

+++

Inside, she walked with purpose, rounding one corner, then another, and then into the large chamber where the air was thick with memory of unspeakable acts, the taking without consent, the brutality of the stronger practiced on the weaker. She covered her mouth and nose with her hand, moving rapidly into a smaller room where she found him.

The tattooist’s face was set as though stone. She couldn’t see his expression when she indicated the name to him, waving her fingers over her shoulder, bending her head in supplication to the permanence of his art. She wondered if he recognized the letters as the other man's name. Wondered if he remembered him. She heard him grunt softly and then the whir of the iron filled her ears with focused sound.

She had never been tattooed, but pain was familiar to her. Being alive hurt. Paying homage to the dead hurt. The injurious nature of her heart hurt. He muttered a kind of apology for having to put his hand on her and she nodded her assent. His fingers gripping the sloping edge of her shoulder, his palm cool and contrasting with the heat of the tattooing.

Squeezing her eyes shut, she relished the burn and scratch of the needles, skimming across the thin skin, jarring off the vertebrae in her neck. She knew that it was on her, his death. So many deaths were on her. She easily could have added Fool to the long list. She didn’t know how to be thankful for the jammed shotgun, but she felt the emotion of it in her throat and it was in that same place where regret stuck. A sharp and splintered bone. She had betrayed The Ace. She had used her crew as a weapon. Leading them trusting into the violence of their deaths. And in her darkest moments she gagged on the idea that their broken and burned bodies were buried out on the Fury Road with their spirits trapped within. Not walking the halls of Valhalla not redeemed. 

What was wrong with her? Kill or be killed, she thought, with a sideways glancing of her eyes beneath her eyelids. She couldn’t really bear to look at it straight on. Her cold-bloodedness. At the time, in those frantic insane minutes, she had decided there was no choice. War boys lived half-lives and screamed to die shiny and chrome. But The Ace had been known to her, and she to him. She had borne witness to his fierce life over a thousand days. But she had refused to see his death. Had kept her eyes on the Fury Road.

She hoped the tattoo would lessen the pressure in her throat, keep down the bile that rose and rose, her molars rotting from the taste of it. She wanted to pull the bone out of the back of her mouth and scratch his name across her breasts. 

This was better. This was right. The tattooist powered off the gun.

Another noise from him and this time it sounded like approval. He patted her shoulder, once, twice, then left her alone, taking the only light with him. In the dark she felt at the raised letters spelling out THE ACE. Her fingers tracing in blood. 

I’m sorry, she whispered and the caves echoed her apology.

**Author's Note:**

> The trust and loyalty shown by The Ace to Furiosa knocked me out. The wide-open sincerity in the way he asked her "why can't you stop?" broke me. The Ace needs to be memorialized.


End file.
